Symphony.

I am trying to build a charts voting system (for most popular wedding songs) where users can vote a track up or down.

There is no use login so I am defining a user as a vistor identified by a cookie.

There are multiple charts in the system (i.e. best first dance, best rock song, etc) and users can vote on more than one chart and of course a track can appear on more than one chart.

These are the sections I have defined so far:

Charts - Name

Chart Track - Artist - Track - Chart (selectbox link to name in charts section) - Thumbsup (number field) - Thumbsdown (number field) - Total (number field)

Votes - Chart (select box link to name in charts section) - Artist (select box link to artist in chart track section) - Track (select box link to track in chart track section) - User Cookie

I have a datasource that returns the chart tracks filtered by the chart and ordered by the total field. The total field is equal to thumbsup - thumbsdown

I have a custom event that increments either the thumbsup or thumbsdown field on the entry that is passed via $entry_id and then recalculates the total field

Where I am stumped now is how to implement the cookie system to prevent a user from voting more than once. This is what I think I need to do:

• set a cookie when the custom event is triggered
• if the cookie is already set then don't allow the rest of the event to run
• trigger a second event to add the vote to the votes section

What I ideally want to be able to do is when the chart is displayed is to indicate which tracks the user has already voted for and how they have voted. I guess for that I need to store the thumbsup thumbsdown field in the votes section instead?

I can't see how to do this with a stanndard datasource.

With regard to the cookie, do I need to set a cookie for each vote or do I need a single cookie which records all the chart tracks a user has voted for?

I have read a couple of threads here and here but am stll getting this wrap round my head.

Can anyone suggest the best approach? Has anyone done something similar before?